After Santorum Left Senate, Familiar Hands Reached Out

Rick Santorum speaking to members of the Queen City Rotary Club in Manchester, N.H., on Thursday.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

In the years before he lost his Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2006, Rick Santorum worked hard to win hundreds of millions of dollars in additional Medicare money for hospitals in Puerto Rico.

He sponsored at least two Senate bills and pushed to amend a mammoth Medicare overhaul to include the extra spending, which would have benefited Universal Health Services, a Pennsylvania-based hospital management company with facilities in Puerto Rico. If it seems at odds with the small-government philosophy Mr. Santorum now espouses in his presidential campaign, it was in line with his legislative efforts to help businesses in his state.

And some of those businesses were happy to return the favor.

Within months of leaving the Senate, Mr. Santorum joined the board of Universal Health Services, where he collected $395,000 in director’s fees and stock options before resigning last year. He also became a consultant to Consol Energy, after years of advocating drilling and extraction policies helpful to the company, a Pennsylvania gas and coal producer. And he consulted for the American Continental Group, a lobbying firm whose clients won earmarks he sponsored.

As Mr. Santorum’s standing in the race for the Republican presidential nomination has been energized by his strong showing in the Iowa caucus, so too has the scrutiny of his activities since leaving the Senate. When he left office he was not especially wealthy, but records show he wasted little time fashioning a lucrative post-government career based largely on income from businesses that had benefited from his work in Congress.

John Brabender, a senior adviser to Mr. Santorum’s campaign, said Thursday that the former senator had not drastically increased his net worth since leaving Capitol Hill and that it would be wrong to link his consulting work with anything he did in the Senate.

“He’s done a lot of things that have helped a lot of companies and a lot of individuals,” Mr. Brabender said. “Almost anywhere he went, there’s somebody who benefited from his legislation.”

Certainly, Mr. Santorum would not be the first politician to take the revolving door to greener pastures in the private sector. But a look at his record both in and out of the Senate finds overlaps between the two, suggesting that connections he made while in office helped soften the sting of his unexpected re-election defeat.

“Given his long and well-documented efforts aimed at providing American consumers with affordable energy,” said Lisa Seay, a spokeswoman for Consol Energy, the company hired Mr. Santorum “to provide strategic counsel on a variety of public policy-related issues.”

A financial disclosure report Mr. Santorum filed last August as part of his presidential campaign shows the full extent of his newfound wealth. He earned a total of more than $1 million in the previous 18 months from several jobs, including a fellowship with a conservative research organization, serving as a commentator for Fox News and a handful of consulting contracts, as well as income from rental properties in Pennsylvania.

The campaign has repeatedly highlighted Mr. Santorum’s humble Pennsylvania roots — he is the grandson of a coal miner — and sought to portray him as a champion of working people. Indeed, he was one of the poorer members of the Senate and by his own admission was living paycheck to paycheck at times. But by the time his Senate career drew to a close, he had become an emblem for some of a pay-to-play culture on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Santorum enjoyed unusually close ties to Washington lobbyists while in office. For several years, he held regular breakfast meetings with a handpicked group of 30 to 40 power players, ostensibly to brief them on the Republican agenda. But the meetings began with a representative of the Republican National Committee circulating a list of open jobs at trade associations and other lobbying shops, according to one participant.

The jobs list was part of a carefully plotted effort by party activists and leaders to make sure these positions were filled by Republican loyalists, an effort that was championed by Tom DeLay in the House and came to be known as the “K Street Project.”

The meetings became a lightning rod for criticism during Mr. Santorum’s unsuccessful 2006 Senate re-election campaign. Mr. Santorum would later deny being part of the K Street Project, but his support for the effort was reported in several news accounts. And while he was never accused of wrongdoing, the harsh glare from the attacks ultimately forced him to step aside from his role spearheading ethics reform legislation in the wake of the scandal involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

In 2006, Mr. Santorum led all federal candidates in contributions from lobbyists and their family members, taking in roughly $500,000, nearly 40 percent more than the next closest candidate, Senator George Allen, a Virginia Republican, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. That tightknit relationship could make it difficult for him to appeal to Tea Party members and other voters yearning for a candidate free of inside-the-Beltway taint.

“Santorum is portraying himself as this outsider, when he was really the ultimate insider,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group that was critical of Mr. Santorum’s Senate ethics record.

His attentiveness to issues important to his supporters and their lobbyists seemed to pay dividends later.

The lobbyist donations he collected in 2006 included about $14,000 from people associated with the American Continental Group, the Washington-based lobbying firm, which had several regular participants at Mr. Santorum’s K Street breakfast meetings. Mr. Santorum signed on with the firm as a consultant in July 2009, collecting at least $65,000 for “legislative policy consulting services,” according to his financial disclosure report.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2006 that Mr. Santorum and Pennsylvania’s other senator at the time, Arlen Specter, claimed credit for millions of dollars in earmarks to firms represented by American Continental. The firm did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Mr. Santorum’s efforts involving the gas exploration and coal industries were beneficial to Consol Energy in broader ways. He sponsored bills to expand offshore drilling, joined Consol in promoting mine safety and was the keynote speaker for a conference on financial market regulation organized by a group headed by a Consol executive.

When Mr. Santorum joined Consol as a consultant in July 2007, one of his former legislative aides, Tommy Johnson, was working for Consol as a Washington lobbyist. Ms. Seay, the Consol spokeswoman, said Mr. Santorum’s work with the company ended last spring when he started his presidential campaign.

Perhaps his most lucrative post-Senate business relationship was with Universal Health Services, which he joined as an independent member of the board in April 2007. Another director, Anthony Pantaleoni, a lawyer in New York, said Mr. Santorum was a valuable addition because of his “good knowledge of health care issues” and insights as a former lawmaker.

Mr. Pantaleoni said that Mr. Santorum and the company’s chief executive, Alan B. Miller, knew each other and that Mr. Miller asked him to join the board. He said he was unaware of Mr. Santorum helping with any specific issue in the Senate, although he acknowledged that Universal Health Services wanted the higher Medicare reimbursements that Mr. Santorum championed. How much the company stood to gain is unclear, as it later sold much of its Puerto Rico holdings.

Between 2003 and 2005, Mr. Santorum sponsored or co-sponsored several legislative initiatives that would have increased Medicare payments to hospitals in Puerto Rico, where health care providers long complained that the program was less generous to them than to their counterparts in the 50 states. Mr. Santorum, who was joined in his effort by a handful of other lawmakers, said at the time he was standing up for elderly patients shortchanged by inequities in Medicare.

A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that one of his attempts to address the issue — an amendment to the 2003 Medicare overhaul — would have cost as much as $400 million over 10 years. The reimbursement formula was eventually changed, but not to the extent Mr. Santorum sought.

A version of this article appears in print on January 6, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: When Santorum Left the Senate, Familiar Hands Reached Out. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe